Last Blog

I'm going to post a final blog because.....well because I can. I'm assuming Dr. Sexson might still be going through the blogs and maybe I'll time mine with when he gets around to mine. This is unlikely, but I think there may be a few stragglers reading the blogs the night before the final in case they missed something. Here's a Golden Bough Christmas quote to get your holiday blood flowing:

First, in regard to the dates of the festivals it can be no mere accident that two of the most important and widely spread of the festivals are timed to coincide more or less exactly with the summer and winter solstices, that is, with the two turning-points in the sun’s apparent course in the sky when he reaches respectively his highest and his lowest elevation at noon. Indeed with respect to the midwinter celebration of Christmas we are not left to conjecture; we know from the express testimony of the ancients that it was instituted by the church to supersede an old heathen festival of the birth of the sun, which was apparently conceived to be born again on the shortest day of the year, after which his light and heat were seen to grow till they attained their full maturity at midsummer. Therefore it is no very far-fetched conjecture to suppose that the Yule log, which figures so prominently in the popular celebration of Christmas, was originally designed to help the labouring sun of midwinter to rekindle his seemingly expiring light.

I think we could all use a yule log of sorts during this finals week. It'd be nice if we had a fireplace in class, but I guess you can't always get what you want.

Whenever I think of people quoting the Bible, I think of texts being so universal that they appeal to nearly everyone. I never connected mythology as equally powerful literature to guide people's lives. This class, as did my last Sexson class, improved my writing skills and cemented my desire to study more in literature. Thanks to all of you for being wonderful piers and thank you Dr. Sexson for going above and beyond the duty of a professor.

Sloppy 12/9 final exam notes

Final myth stuff

What is the only permanent thing? Change
What is the modern version of pan and Apollo? Tenacious d
Study the Signature/archetype
Who brought snow Pygmalion to life (in the presentation)? John madden
At the beginning there was the flood and at the end there was a flood
How did he get away from the cyclops? He said his name was no man
What can be said about all ends? They are all beginings
What two parts did Corrine say were about the same? The heart and the groin
In reference to Tristian's presentation, what did the natives know? 
Oral traditions authentically mythological
What did John Orsi compare the writing process to? Loss of virginity
James Joyce compares himself to what mythological personage? God
Eating raw flesh of one dismembered is called what? Omophageous
Read afterword of Ovid
P155 of eliade: if cattle and horses could draw pictures of their gods, they would be projections of themselves
P199: fairytales in the appendix. Paraphrasing, sagas can be distinguished from fairytales. Tragedy is tragic and the happy ending of the fairytale is not to be seen as stupid, it's a transcendence of all the suffering. Willy wonk lived happily ever after. The oral vs written tradition. The ways in which mythology damages catholic view. 
P172: popular theology...superstitions in which come back and retold over and over and over
P177childrens myth

Reconstructing Religion and Green Grass

I'm posting another Modest Mouse song, Lives, that I'd like to "reconstruct" with the aid of mythology. But first I want to make a side comment on something Dr. Sexson stated in class today regarding reconstruction. He said that mythology doesn't deconstruct religions, but instead it reconstructs their stories. In order to reconstruct something, doesn't it have to be deconstructed first? Or at the very least, it has no resemblance of a properly constructed idea, so it must be built up differently. We have the privilege of studying mythology in an very open-minded setting (at least no one in our class objected to Dr. Sexson's reconstruction of their beliefs) and that's all well and good, but the rest of the world does not interpret religion with open ears and closed mouths. Dr. Sexson said so himself that, "People usually hold their religious values very dear to them." You can call it "deconstructing" or "reconstructing", but at the base of it all, it represents a fundamental change that most people will not recognize. The world does not agree on a universal afterlife. The world does not abide by a set of universal values. The world does not read the same texts as we are reading. I mean, seriously, who else on the MSU campus has read The Golden Bough, Ovid's Metamorphosis, Henderson the Rain King, or Myth and Reality outside of the select handfuls of students that study under Dr. Sexson. One would be hard pressed to convince another student to read any ONE of those books, let alone all four of them. If we are reconstructing the MSU student body's religions, how can they interpret what we are saying if they are ignorant or abide by a different set of texts? Our interpretation asks them to make a fundamental change in the way they view life; something that may not happen in a year's span or even that of a lifetime.

I digress. Here is "Lives" by Modest Mouse:

Everyone's afraid of their own life
If you could be anything you want
I bet you'd be disappointed, am I right?
No one really knows the ones they love
If you knew everything they thought
I bet that you'd wish that they'd just shut up
Well, you were the dull sound of sharp math
When you were alive
No one's going to play the harp when you die
And if I had a nickel for every damn dime
I'd have half the time, do you mind?
Everyone's afraid of their own lives
If you could be anything you want
I bet you'd be disappointed, am I right?
Am I right? And it's our lives
It's hard to remember, it's hard to remember
We're alive for the first time
It's hard to remember were alive for the last time
It's hard to remember, it's hard to remember
To live before you die
It's hard to remember, it's hard to remember
That our lives are such a short time
It's hard to remember, it's hard to remember
When it takes such a long time
It's hard to remember, it's hard to remember
My mom's God is a woman and my mom she is a witch
I like this
My hell comes from inside, comes from inside myself
Why fight this?
Everyone's afraid of their own lives
If you could be anything you want
I bet you'd be disappointed, am I right?

There are many myths that this song touches base with, most importantly the story of Midas and the general idea of "the grass is always greener on the other side." Midas thought that if he could just turn anything he ever wanted to gold, all of his problems would disappear. Be careful what you wish for is the moral to that story. Life is not a math problem to be solved in one full swoop, but rather it is a never-ending essay to be written as time passes us by. We as humans have the natural instinct that what we have in the present is not as good as in the past and could be better in the future. Issac Brock says in the song that, "My hell comes from inside myself". This shows that everything we think about our reality is a perception that we construct through myths. Our concept of Hell is entirely our projection of our worst imagination, our worst thoughts imaginable, and our deepest fears we choose not to face. We our thrown in constant doubt of whether or not out conception of a "happy life" is as good as someone else's life. That feeling of missing out, being asleep and not awake to life is constantly present with each new realization of another story taking place in our proverbial rear-view mirror of life. Like Lot's wife, we want to look at the destruction that is taking place behind us. Like Eve, we want to eat the fruit for which we are not supposed to eat. We are curious of what is happening around us. Our live seem boring compared to the lives of Gods, Heroes, Action Heroes, Prophets, and natives of distant cultures. Dr. Sexson would say this is why we read, so that we can discover these mythologies and enrich our boring lives.

Dark Holes

I was revisiting Eliade's Myth and Reality, you now like any normal college student would, and I found a term we have touched on, albeit indirectly. I am referring to the term vagina dentata which in Latin means "toothed vagina". Here's a quote to give some context:

A large number of myths feature (1) a hero being swallowed by a sea monster and emerging victorious after breaking through the monster's belly; (2) initiatory passage through a vagina dentata, or the dangerous descent into a cave or crevice assimilated to the mouth of the uterus of Mother Earth. (Eliade, 81)

I was shocked at some of the pictures that popped up on the interwebs when I typed in "vagina dentata". (The picture above is the most PG-13 rated picture that depicts the combination of teeth and a vagina.) Anyway, the point Eliade is making is that heroes go into a lot of dark crevices as a final "climax" to their journey. (There is going to be a frenzy of double entendres in this post, so stop reading now if you're already disgusted) We've been referencing these spaces throughout the course, but we just haven't been referring to them as Mother Earth's Vagina. Jonah and the Whale, Beowulf, Lord of the Rings, the Death Star in Star Wars, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and countless other stories through the course of time have had the hero journey into this mythical space that usually contains some sort of monster or obstacle. In a roundabout way, the hero must come back to it's birth canal in order to complete their "circle of life." If the hero can conquer a vagina that's lined by teeth, than their place in mythology as a hero is cemented in time.

Class Notes from 12/7/10

First off, I'd like to congratulate everyone on the great job they are doing in both the group and individual presentations. I've been keeping track of the times when Dr. Sexson nods his head or makes "approving mumble noises" and more times than not they come in response to a quote rather than an original revelation by the presenter. It seems very apparent to me that Dr. Sexson is more impressed with our ability to quote text from literature that is relevant to our thesis than that of our own creation. Is this a commentary on the nature of myths and literature as a whole? Have we really sucked out the well of originality so much that we cannot produce profound thoughts of our own?

Yes, I know that before we can talk about mythology we must first read and study the important points that have already been made. One cannot make a credible research paper without quoting some other source of literature. Even in the "what I knew then and what I know now" papers, Dr. Sexson seems to be looking for specific examples of eschatology, creation, or storytelling that has shaped one's perspective.

Each time a presenter finishes, Dr. Sexson points out the sources or former stories in which the presenter referenced. Mythology seems to be not so much about telling your story, but more about how your story has already been told.

I want my story to be original instead of being a story which has an origin that is out of one's hands.

I exited the Suburban through the windshield

The following story is true and took place on November 19th, the night before the Cat-Griz game a few weeks ago. I will put this story into the category of the sublime.

I exited the car out the windshield. Exit as in walk out, luckily I and no one else were actually ejected. The suburban was lying on its side, so using any of the doors was out of the question. The roads were icy, but they had gotten better through the drive. I was asleep when it happened. Instead of falling asleep to a nightmare I awoke to a real-life one.

The paramedic asked me for my name and address. I didn't answer. He asked me again and I finally snapped out of my trance. I had otherquestions that I was asking myself, "how close was I to death? How am I so incredibly lucky?" the paramedic finished bandaging my hand. It was super bright inside the ambulance, but it was so warm at the same time. I didn't want to go back outside. It was cold. My running shoes suddenly acted as sponges in the smallest amounts of snow. Either way I was still in shock.

If you've ever seen a passenger's perspective from a car-rollover in a movie they almost always happen in slow-motion. That's exactly how it felt. The driver slammed on the brakes, fishtailed, and then it was as if God slowed down time as the vehicle began to roll. The car came to a violent jolt on its side and time sped up again.
  
We shouldn't have even been driving that night. We passed six rolled vehicles in the median between Belgrade and Butte alone. I thought to myself, "there's a good chance we could end up like that." And then even further back in my mind I told myself that it wouldn't happen to us. That's when I fell asleep. Or as Dr. Sexson would put it, I was already asleep and kept on sleeping. Will I ever awake?
  
There's these small particles in my hair..is that dandruff or glass?  Fuck, I think it's glass. I spent the next hour picking out the tiniest specks of glass from the roots of my hair. I eventually fell asleep that night. I was still in shock from how incredibly luck I really was.
  
All 7 passengers were unharmed. Maybe because I'm still in shock, but I have no idea how to learn from this incident. This story feels very disjointed towards my overall mythology. I was aware of my near-death experience, but I'm still not really scared of death. I must still be dreaming. Or sleeping. Or...
  
 

1st draft of final paper

Myths That Stand the Test of Time

Myths recapitulate reality throughout the world in almost every form imaginable. Children are entertained by Disney fairytales in both the home and classroom setting. As they grow up, the myths are retold again in more mature settings such as The Odyssey and Star Wars. Even as adults, cultures throughout the world immerse themselves in imaginative worlds even if they are the same worlds of the childish fairytales. Many of these adults convince themselves that their reality has occurred first and that myths come second as a byproduct or reality. In Myth and Reality, Mircea Eliade argues that myth occurs first and reality follows suit. It is up to the storytellers to create the narrative of the world. Without myths, there is no reality for the world to make sense of. Along with Eliade’s examination of myths, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari define the concept of a rhizome which helps explain the longevity of myths.

In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's essay A Thousand Plateaus, the authors describe a root system that weaves together a seemingly unitary structure that can unfold into multiplicity. Every text has a thesis or in the case of myths, a moral of the story. According to Deleuze and Guattari, a thesis can be unwound into a series of references and regimes of signs. The entire framework is compared to a botany framework. The "root" represents symbols found in various settings that imitate the world. A "radicle" represents the seedling or meaning from a root. Finally, the radicles and roots conglomerate into a system known as a "rhizome". In terms of a typical hero myth, the separation, initiation, and return elements can be seen as roots and the retellings or generational references can be seen as the radicles. Rhizomes act as both barriers and rewards for the reader to extract from the text. This cat and mouse game between the reader and the author serves as a larger analogy to real life settings. True rhizomes exist without footnotes because in real life symbols that are not yet defined to people remain meaningless until that person researches that symbol more. Each time a new discovery of a text meaning takes place, connections within the rhizome are unearthed, but new radicles can form to expand the rhizome. Hence, a well-designed rhizome should have roots that can form more than one radicle and radicles that make the rhizome bigger.

In terms of timeless literature, the author must essentially make up as much words and concepts possible in order to have a timeless rhizome. Samuel Colridge made his works stand out because he used words and phrases such as "desynonymize", "esemplastic", and "willful suspension of disbelief". Some of his terms have been understood and used in the 21st century while others are so obscure they remain out of the mainstream lexicon yet still studied with each new generation of English Majors. If an author like Coleridge can add new words to the reader's lexicon over multiple generations, than the rhizome that he created was a success. The root becomes the term "esemplastic", the radicle becomes the meaning that is given to a generation of students, and the rhizome becomes their interpretations and roots that they impose within their own rhizome. In that sense, an author's final contribution from their rhizome is that it becomes the root of a new rhizome to continue the cycle. The functions of rhizomes are essential to Eliade’s interpretation of myths.

Eliade places myth above reality in several different examples and states, “Myth is an extremely complex cultural reality, which can be approached and interpreted from various and complementary viewpoints” (Eliade, 5). In this instance, our cultural reality is the product of the homogenization of storytellers and their myths. But as Eliade points out, interpretation plays a role in fragmenting stories. People rely on language to communicate with each other on the most basic level. Metaphors, heroes, and other narrative techniques are then needed to convey concepts through language. One person’s myth expands to the reality of millions. Through the use of radicles, authors control the lens in which readers see the world.

Eliade expounds on the notion of authors as God-like figures by stating, “Through myth, the world can be apprehended as a perfectly articulated, intelligible and significant Cosmos” (Eliade, 145). Pretend for a moment that the world and readers lie in a room of intellectual darkness. The world cannot escape this darkness until it has experiences to draw from. The collective conscious of the world relies on authors to shed light within this dark room. Readers cannot reach enlightenment on experiences alone because they can only grope about in their surroundings. Without context, shapes and the environment that surrounds readers have been rendered meaningless. Myth creates this context and connects readers’ experiences with knowledge.

Even when the roots of a rhizome are fading, the radicles can form new rhizomes. Eliade addresses the different mediums in which myths surivive:

But even when the Supreme God has completely disappeared from cult and is “forgotten”, his memory survives, camouflaged and degraded, in the initiations and narrations of shamans and medicine men, in religious symbolism…and in certain types of cosmogonic myths (Eliade, 97).

The storyteller doesn’t need to be recognized as a God in order for a myth to survive. As long as the radicles of a mythical rhizome remain, the cycle can continue. Cultures lose track of the origins of myths and their respective rhizomes, but modern radicles pick up the core meanings of myth and repeat them across generations.

Works Cited

Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. San Francisco: HarperColins, 1963. Print.

Doin' the Cockroach

I'm jumping in to the fray over which Modest Mouse song is best in depicting suffering. I would agree with Sally more that "The View" brings up an excellent point of "if it takes shit to make bliss, well I feel pretty blissfully." I think we all can find some solace in that statement after reading about the unfortunate demises in the "End" sections of Ovid. In addition, Sarah's argument for "Cowboy Dan" has some interesting parallels with Job, but it's a story we've heard FAR too many times.

Modest Mouse's best song for suffering is by far "Doin' the Cockroach":

I was in heaven
I was in hell
Believe in neither
But fear them as
well
This one's a doctor
This one's a lawyer
This one's a cash
fiend
taking your money
Back of the metro
Ride on the
greyhound
Drunk on the Amtrak
Please shut up
Another rider
He was a
talker
Talking about TV
Please shut up
This one's a
crazer
Daydreaming disaster
The origin of junk food
Rutting through
garbage
Tasty but worthless
Dogs eat their own shit
We're doing the
cockroach yeah
Doin the cockroach yeah
Doin the cockroach yeah (alright,
not bad) [x3]
One year
Twenty years
Forty years
Fifty
years
Down the road in your life
You'll look in the mirror
And say, "My
parents are still alive."
You move your mouth
You shake your tongue
You
vibrate my eardrums
You're saying words
But you know I ain't
listening

I think one of the most terrifying feelings in life is when a situation is beyond one's control. In the song, Isacc Brock sings about somehow being in Heaven and Hell at the same time even though he doesn't believe in them. He expresses his frustration with the structures of capitalism and how we are living out our lives earning and dispensing money with no say at all. He points out how dogs eat their own shit with the hidden question of whether humans do the same thing. All of these factors that seems out of our control cummulate to the feeling of being a cockroach. If we agree that our larger environment is out of our control, aren't we nothing more than the lowest form of life on Earth? In T.S. Eliot's, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, he compares his existence to a cockroach as well:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? 60
And how should I presume?

T.S Eliot is "Doin the Cockroach" or rather Isacc Bruce emulated Eliot's suffering. Both writers ask the question, "How can we press forward in the face of insurmountable adversity?" Granted, these are Job stories to an extent, but there's one major difference: we can't escape the sufferings of life if we tried. We don't even realize how life begins or ends. No one will explain the middle to us. Literature, school, friends, and activities on the weekend are all variations of people passing the time because we don't know what else to do. There is no larger goal, other than to live as full and as busy a life as possible. We need to scurry around like a cockroach more, otherwise we'll get squished by unforeseeable forces. We can't control these forces. Worrying about it is futile. We can only wriggle about and define what life is to us.

Patience

First off, I'd like to apologize for not keeping up on the blog like I should be. The last couple of weeks have been busy. Too busy for my liking.

I've been thinking. The secret moral of the story of the class is patience. Through mythology, we learn to be patient with others and ourselves. If someone is feeling the weight of the world on their shoulders, it's perfectly acceptable because there are books upon books of people that have been in the same situation. Be patient because the world moves in cycles and your periods of down will be followed by periods of up. In Ovid's Metamorphosis, the heroes make the mistake of not being patient enough and then pay for their mistake at the whims of the Gods. If Icarus had been a bit more patient, he would've flown just fine. Proserpina and Eve impatiently ate forbidden fruits without thinking through the consequences. In one of the few stories with a happy ending, Pygmalion lived happily ever after with his statue because he was patient. Only the Gods are able to be impatient. Only they are allowed instant gratification. For the rest of us measly mortals, we must wait our turn.

Dr. Sexson is dolling out patience by the handfuls every time he interacts with us. Some people (myself included) are learning patience through reading thousands of pages of literature. Will what I read now ever help me in life later?

Others are searching for patience in their writing. Will what I say now be relevant in 3, 5, or 10 years? Now I'm sure Dr. Sexson will argue that whatever you write down is important, but let's be honest, the world has only so much patience. It is humanly impossible to read every work of literature ever written. But with the help of Ovid's Metamorphosis we can patiently realize that there is really only a set of stories that are being rewritten over and over again.

I just hope it means I have to read less.

Bulls

Here's an excerpt from Chapter 43: Dionysus of The Golden Bough:

A feature in the mythical character of Dionysus, which at first sight appears inconsistent with his nature as a deity of vegetation, is that he was often conceived and represented in animal shape, especially in the form, or at least with the horns, of a bull. Thus he is spoken of as “cow-born,” “bull,” “bull-shaped,” “bull-faced,” “bull-browed,” “bull-horned,” “horn-bearing,” “two-horned,” “horned.” He was believed to appear, at least occasionally, as a bull. His images were often, as at Cyzicus, made in bull shape, or with bull horns; and he was painted with horns. Types of the horned Dionysus are found amongst the surviving monuments of antiquity. On one statuette he appears clad in a bull’s hide, the head, horns, and hoofs hanging down behind. Again, he is represented as a child with clusters of grapes round his brow, and a calf’s head, with sprouting horns, attached to the back of his head. On a red-figured vase the god is portrayed as a calf-headed child seated on a woman’s lap. The people of Cynaetha held a festival of Dionysus in winter, when men, who had greased their bodies with oil for the occasion, used to pick out a bull from the herd and carry it to the sanctuary of the god. Dionysus was supposed to inspire their choice of the particular bull, which probably represented the deity himself; for at his festivals he was believed to appear in bull form. The women of Elis hailed him as a bull, and prayed him to come with his bull’s foot. They sang, “Come hither, Dionysus, to thy holy temple by the sea; come with the Graces to thy temple, rushing with thy bull’s foot, O goodly bull, O goodly bull!” The Bacchanals of Thrace wore horns in imitation of their god. According to the myth, it was in the shape of a bull that he was torn to pieces by the Titans; and the Cretans, when they acted the sufferings and death of Dionysus, tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth. Indeed, the rending and devouring of live bulls and calves appear to have been a regular feature of the Dionysiac rites. When we consider the practice of portraying the god as a bull or with some of the features of the animal, the belief that he appeared in bull form to his worshippers at the sacred rites, and the legend that in bull form he had been torn in pieces, we cannot doubt that in rending and devouring a live bull at his festival the worshippers of Dionysus believed themselves to be killing the god, eating his flesh, and drinking his blood.

Its easy for one someone to say that we have moved past eating bulls in such savage ways, but one must look closer at how and the way we eat. Don't many football players, construction workers, or military personnel demand a big, juicy steak before preparing for their feats of strength? Aren't men embodying the strengths of bulls when they challenge them to races at Pamplona or devour their muscle on a daily basis?American's worship the bull in every aspect of life. The hamburger is arguably America's most popular meal choice. Between the overwhelming presence of McDonald's and countless other fast food chains beef is a dominant food staple. On the nation's birthday, The Fourth of July, families across the country are urged to eat beef. When body builder's try to put on muscle, it is known as "beefing up". When someone is picking a fight with a foe, they "have beef" with that person. "Bullying" is a rite of passage for males; from using tiny fists in playground fights to using deadly weapons in international wars. The financial lifeblood of the United States lies within the stock market. It's symbol is a bull. The energy drink of choice for the nation's youth is Red Bull with the slogan: "It gives you wings." A company's intent becomes very clear when it states that their product gives God like powers to both bulls and people.

Not only is eating a bull a sign of money and power, but also wearing and covering objects with its smooth skin is something we do every day. We wear leather to make our feet strong and we wear leather jackets to become more bullheaded. All fabrics pale in comparison to leather couches and leather upholstery. When you buy a luxury car, you buy one that's fully loaded with a leather interior.

Ultimately, that is what we are searching for when we subconsciously devour every part of the bull; we want to be fully loaded. The God like qualities of a bull are intimidating, like a loaded gun with a bullet in the chamber. Once we become the bull, our shoulders have broadened and we are able to run over anything in our path with the weight of a ton of bricks.

Now we understand why Pasiphae was so eager to don a cow suit and court the white bull. It had qualities that didn't even come close to any puny man! Hmmm, two scrawny legs or four beefy ones? Thin porous skin or a tough leathery hide? Nimble fingers or powerful hooves? Yeah, I'm pretty sure I would want my kid to have horns too. No one would bully him, that's for sure.

Nightmares

I could have written this blog about a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, but I didn't. I have not recently been raped or eaten my own son. Not even on a metaphorical level. My near-death experiences lie in the category of far-death experiences. (In other words: not exciting). The closest I come to death is in my nightmares.

I am in a parking lot, usually at a grocery store, and suddenly everyone is looking up above the store. It's an asteroid hurtling towards Earth. I am filled with the most terrible of feelings. I am thinking to myself that, "this is it. I'm going to die now." And then I wake up.

I'm in a large city with skyscrapers everywhere. It is cloudy, but it could be all smoke; I cannot tell. Planes are crashing into buildings all around me. I have no idea if I am in a building that's about to get hit or if I am standing on the floor that is about to get hit of a certain building. I hurry to the lobby where others have bunkered down behind a desk. It's understood that we have to get moving because the building is about to collapse. Somehow the group is able to hijack a plane that is attempting to take off outside. I tackle a terrorist and slice his throat with a knife.

I am the star of an action movie that is no longer entertaining when the danger becomes all the more imminent.

Professor Sexson also asked us to have a sublime experience; one where we experience beauty and fear at the same time. I would argue that we as humans can only experience simulated sublime moments and that we reach greater heights of fear and beauty within our dreams and our encounters with our subconscious. Let's say you are in a car accident where you were pushed to the brink of death. How aware are we of that brink? How much time do we have to think, "I am going to die"? Aren't our dreams slowed down more so that we can have a heightened sense of our existence? The phrase "being lulled into something" indicates someone being put into a sleep or dream state. When people are groggy, their defenses are down. In most dreams (and in all of my dreams) people are not in control. Isn't that the most frightening state of all?

Being Rational

The underlying theme of the class has been based around Professor Sexson's essay, "Myth: the way we were or the way we are?" Professor Sexson has made it clear from the beginning and in his essay that myth is the shadow that we cannot elude. To him, storytelling is how we thought, currently see, and will see the world from our earliest memories to our gasping breaths before death.

I, foolish as it may be, believe the opposite. The more I read about talking snakes, the more I am unable to willfully suspend disbelief. I have have surrounded myself in a perceived reality and I have shunned "myth". I know, I know- there are probably things that I believe that are no more real than Cyrinx and Pan, but many have labeled me as a rationalist. In Mireca Eliade's Myth and Reality, the author talks much about how myth IS reality and not as much about how it is NOT reality. In chapter 8, Eliade discusses myth and rationalists:

If we are to believe Herodotus, Solon already said that "the deity is full of envy and instability." In any case, the Milesian philosophers refused to see the Figure of the true divinity in Homer's descriptions. When Thales affirmed that "every thing is full of gods", he was revolting against the Homeric idea that Gods inhabited only certain regions of the Cosmos. Anaximander attempts to present a total conception of the universe, without gods and without myths. (Eliade, 152).

There was a lot of name-dropping in that passage, but the one philosopher I chose was Anaximander. His bio is here. He was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who stated that physical forces, rather than supernatural ones created order in the universe. Rationalists like Anaximander pointed out how arbitrary the Greek Gods were. Why wasn't there a God of Yogurt? (There is a Greek of The Gods Yogurt which is delicious, but that's besides the point.)

I know I'm discrediting the value of myth in a mythology class, but hear me out. If mythology is a discourse in the way we are, is it only because we believe in it? Could we just as easily believe in chaos instead? The only reason we are aware of these stories is because cultures carry them down from generation to generation. Maybe rationalists like myself could destroy the imagination over a series of demythified explanations such as Anaximander.

This is a weak argument that I will continue to refine in the coming classes. I am not fully convinced that myth is the the way we are and yet I know the shadow of myth follows me everywhere I go. It will haunt me in my dreams tonight.

Narcissus and Revelations

I will start out this post with two quotes: the first is from the Golden Bough and the second is from the comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes:

Where the shadow is regarded as so intimately bound up with the life of the man that its loss entails debility or death, it is natural to expect that its diminution should be regarded with solicitude and apprehension, as betokening a corresponding decrease in the vital energy of its owner. In Amboyna and Uliase, two islands near the equator, where necessarily there is little or no shadow cast at noon, the people make it a rule not to go out of the house at mid-day, because they fancy that by doing so a man may lose the shadow of his soul. The Mangaians tell of a mighty warrior, Tukaitawa, whose strength waxed and waned with the length of his shadow. In the morning, when his shadow fell longest, his strength was greatest; but as the shadow shortened towards noon his strength ebbed with it, till exactly at noon it reached its lowest point; then, as the shadow stretched out in the afternoon, his strength returned. A certain hero discovered the secret of Tukaitawa’s strength and slew him at noon. (Frazer, Chapter 18: The Perils of the Soul)

When I think of shadows and reflections, I think of the story of Narcissus and how he becomes enraptured by his reflection in both the life and the afterlife. He himself becomes his only friend. Certain cultures see reflections and shadows as extensions of the soul. The shorter the shadow, the less power it has. Every now and then I will run in the wee hours of the evening and I'll marvel at how enormous my shadow stretches. It's as if the light is blowing a giant bubble of a shadow that is pushing against my body and generating a giant space at the same time. With all the technology and resources that we have at our tips, there is still nothing that can replicate a shadow's extension of the body and soul. Instead of covering inches at a time. I am leaping and bounding by school bus lengths. In some instances, I'll be running at night beneath light posts and the shadow seemingly becomes a separate entity. It starts with me and then runs away with each passing light source. What does that say about my soul? Am I on an endless loop that's only as strong as my light source? Do people in cloud covered regions have less of a soul since they rarely see their shadow?

Calvin is acting just like Narcissus in two manners: he is afraid that nothing outside of himself can live up to his expectations and that he is essentially alone since Hobbes is a stuffed animal. The strip not only brings up questions like, "What is the meaning of life?", but it also addresses how Death could be around the corner. What if the "Middles" story is truncated by death? What if the Creation story is actually a short introduction to the story of Death?

Perseus and Atlas

The Perseus stories begin in Book IV at around page 133 of Ovid's Metamorphosis.

Perseus was the son of Danae and technically the son of Jove. In the myth, however, Jove helped conceive Perseus by way of a golden shower. Of course. Perseus was blessed with the task of flying around the world via wings carrying the head of Medusa. He eventually scared Atlas the giant into a mountain:

At that, he turned his back to Atlas--and held up Medusa's head with his left hand. Great Atlas now became a mountain mass as huge as he had been; his beard, his hair were changed to woods; his shoulders and his arms, to ridges; what had been his head was now a mountaintop; his bones were changed to stones. That done, in all his parts his form grew still more huge--such was your will, o gods; his head supported all of heaven and its stars.

....And that's how mountains were formed. It's interesting to think of a man transforming into a mountain. Which parts represent his legs? Where is the 'eye' of the mountain?

Perseus went on to wrap Medusa's head in seaweed, turn it to rock, and cast it into the ocean. This was the creation story for coral.

The dude kicked some major ass AND got the girl Andromeda in the end. How is there not a movie based off of this character? He should at LEAST have a mediocre cartoon based after him. I didn't see Clash of The Titans, was this story in there?

Blogs, Dreams, and INCEPTION

I was particularly interested in Curtis Pattee's blog because of the Inception reference at the end. Like any good story, I could immediately bring myself into Curtis's dream and see the Lego walls, feel the ominous presence of a void, and instantly recall the falling motion he experiences.

Since we're on the topic of dreams. I decided to insert this clip of Inception which highlights what makes dreams awesome:

"Dreams....they feel real while we're in them, it's only when we wake up do we realize that something was strange.....You never really remember the beginning of a dream, do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on." In this sense, myths and creation stories fall into the same category. There is no actual start to anything, its more of a jump into an already established setting. Dream, myths, and realities make up that "collective unconscious" that Dr. Jung discovered. In Myth and Reality, Eliade links it all together:

We must now show in what sense Plato's theory of ideas and the Platonic anamnesis can be compared with the attitude and behavior of man in archaic and traditional societies. The man of those societies finds in myths and exemplary models for all his acts. The myths tell him that everything he does or intends to do has already been done, at the beginning of Time, in illo tempore. Hence myths constitute the sums of useful knowledge...Philosophical anamnesis does not recover the memory of the events belonging to former lives, but of truths, that is, the structures of the real.(Eliade, 124).

The myths are not just tales to entertain us, but they are encyclopedias of knowledge pulled from our unconscious basement. The myths provide the structure for which we make sense of reality. Dreams feel real because they have every single element that reality has. Dreams allow for a person to put together no only memories, but also text (written and oral) into visualizations by way of imaginations. It's a meeting ground for myths coming to fruition. People may not believe in Santa Claus in reality, but in a dream they might. The obstacles that people face in their waking moments come crashing down in dreams because they realize that the barrier is an illusion in the first place.

Now go forth and design your reality.

Dreams

I am no good at remembering early memories, but I do have a reoccurring dream to share with you all. It usually happens to me this time of year...

I awake or appear at school not really knowing how I got there. I don't know the day of the week, or the time of day, but I know I am late for a class. Somehow I am taking classes at my old high school and I have neglected to attend one class for a whole semester. I quickly rush to my class and try to catch up what I've missed. It's not working and the teacher is very upset with me. It's always a teacher that I disliked or got a poor grade in a prior class. Suddenly I am transported to a different day. I am late for the class again. I keep racing down the stairs to get to my class and then............. I wake up.

Puke and Rally

Here's an excerpt from The Book of Overthrowing Apophis on the Primitives to Zen site:

Mircea Eliade "From Primitives to Zen": EGYPTIAN COSMOGONY AND THEOGONY

The Lord of All, after having come into being, says: I am he who came into being as Khepri (i.e., the Becoming One). When I came into being, the beings came into being, all the beings came into being after I became. Numerous are those who became, who came out of my mouth, before heaven ever existed, nor earth came into being, nor the worms, nor snakes were created in this place. 1, being in weariness, was bound to them in the Watery Abyss. I found no place to stand. I thought in my heart, I planned in myself, I made all forms being alone, before I ejected Shu, before I spat out Tefnut ¹ before any other who was in me had become. Then I planned in my own heart, and many forms of beings came into being as forms of children, as forms of their children. I conceived by my hand, I united myself with my hand, I poured out of my own mouth. I ejected Shu, I spat out Tefnut. It was my father the Watery Abyss who brought them up, and my eye followed them (?) while they became far from me. After having become one god, there were (now) three gods in me. When I came into being in this land, Shu and Tefnut jubilated in the Watery Abyss in which they were. Then they brought with them my eye. After I had joined together my members, I wept over them, and men came into being out of the tears which came out of my eyes.² Then she (the eye) became enraged³ after she came back and had found that I had placed another in her place, that she had been replaced by the Brilliant One. Then I found a higher place for her on my brow⁴ and when she began to rule over the whole land her fury fell down on the flowering (?) and I replaced what she had ravished. I came out of the flowering (?), I created all snakes, and all that came into being with them. Shu and Tefnut produced Geb and Nut; Geb and Nut produced out of a single body Osiris, Horus the Eyeless one ⁵ Seth, Isis, and Nephthys, one after the other among them. Their children are numerous in this land.


Notes

¹ Shu the air, Tefnut the moist.
² Same myth in the Book of Gates, division 4 (The Tomb of Ramesses VI, P. 169).
³ An allusion to the myth of the Eye of the sun god which departs into a foreign land and is brought back by Shu and Tefnut. Another aspect. of this myth is to be found in the Book of the Divine Cow.
⁴ The fire-spitting snake, the uraeus on the head of the god.
⁵ The Elder Horus of Letopolis.

For those who are keeping track at home, mark this origin myth in the "bodily fluids category". I particularly found the "conceiving by hand" and the ejection of Gods from the mouth. For some reason, I have a picture in my head of Khepri literally giving birth to men via a birth canal sprouting from the palm. I searched online for a visual representation of such, but alas I could not find one. In many of the origins discussed in class, it is established that man is created in God's image. In this Egyptian myth, man is a descendant of God's mucus.

Once again, the snake theme stays consistent throughout thus creation myth. It shows how unoriginal these religions are if they steal the same animal examples from all of the other religions. C'mon Christianity! Let's use some scorpion analogies! "...And then the evil scorpion tempted Adam with the forbidden fruit by waving it back and forth....little did Adam know that the apple was attached to the scorpion's stinger! And that's the story of how God gave man canker-sores.

Class Notes 9/14

My notes from 9/14.....

-Discussed All Souls Day (A sister holiday of Halloween) where people are brought back from the dead and the living are responsible for feeding them.
-Discussed Creation Myths and the tragic hero leaving the perfect home, have his world be split in two (like an egg) and then return to the home or a fragmented/new version of home.

-Defined a creation myth as a symbolic narrative of a cultural tradition or people that describes their earliest beginnings.

5 Basic creation Myths:

-creation ex nihilo: through thought word, dream, or bodily secretions of a divine being
(ex nihilo means out of nothing)
-Earth diver: a bird or amphibian plunges to the seabed to gather mud. It then creates a terrestrial world with the mud.
-Emergence myths: progenitors or earliest ancestors pass through a series of worlds until they reach the present world.
- Creation by the dismemberment of a primordial being
- Creation by the splitting or ordering of a primordial unity such as cracking a cosmic egg or a bringing to form from the chaos

-Discussed Tiamat, monster of chaos and how Marduke kills her with the arrow, splits her in two and creates the sky and earth

-Mentioned the Kaaba stone, the holy rock of Islam located in Mecca.
-Gnosticism is the belief within Christianity that God is actually imperfect.
- Discussed the character Mnemosyne which means memory

Dreams, Reality, and Actuality

The soul of a sleeper is supposed to wander away from his body and actually to visit the places, to see the persons, and to perform the acts of which he dreams. For example, when an Indian of Brazil or Guiana wakes up from a sound sleep, he is firmly convinced that his soul has really been away hunting, fishing, felling trees, or whatever else he has dreamed of doing, while all the time his body has been lying motionless in his hammock. A whole Bororo village has been thrown into a panic and nearly deserted because somebody had dreamed that he saw enemies stealthily approaching it. A Macusi Indian in weak health, who dreamed that his employer had made him haul the canoe up a series of difficult cataracts, bitterly reproached his master next morning for his want of consideration in thus making a poor invalid go out and toil during the night. The Indians of the Gran Chaco are often heard to relate the most incredible stories as things which they have themselves seen and heard; hence strangers who do not know them intimately say in their haste that these Indians are liars. In point of fact the Indians are firmly convinced of the truth of what they relate; for these wonderful adventures are simply their dreams, which they do not distinguish from waking realities.

---The Golden Bough, Chapter 18, The Perils of the Soul

I have yet to have my soul venture off into interesting venues recently. I dream, but they are mundane, consisting of my Dad making me breakfast, or of myself arguing with a friend over meaningless topics. For those who have seen Inception, the dreams within the film are way cooler.

SPOILER ALERT:

The movie, Inception, is about people who go into other people's minds via their dreams through a special device. They then can steal an idea from that person's dreams or they can proceed further into the subconscious by entering into another dream while in the first person's dream. Some characters go down so many levels of dreaming that they eventually reach a stage called limbo; a dream so complex that the dreamer believes he or she is actually in reality.

This touches closely to what Professor Sexson was saying about what is real and what is imaginary. If we think it's real then to us, it's real. If we think it's imaginary, than we have already set a limit on that situation and it can not jump to the level of reality. What about deja vu? Wouldn't that feeling of a situation being eerily familiar only belong in a dream? Pay attention to what we conceive as reality. You may be dreaming sooner than you think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sd0ff1sbJU&feature=channel

Long Thoughts and Short Decisions

A Golden Bough quote: (Somewhere in Chapter 28):

Thus we may fairly conjecture that the names Carnival, Death, and Summer are comparatively late and inadequate expressions for the beings personified or embodied in the customs with which we have been dealing. The very abstractness of the names bespeaks a modern origin; for the personification of times and seasons like the Carnival and Summer, or of an abstract notion like death, is not primitive. But the ceremonies themselves bear the stamp of a dateless antiquity; therefore we can hardly help supposing that in their origin the ideas which they embodied were of a more simple and concrete order. The notion of a tree, perhaps of a particular kind of tree (for some savages have no word for tree in general), or even of an individual tree, is sufficiently concrete to supply a basis from which by a gradual process of generalisation the wider idea of a spirit of vegetation might be reached. But this general idea of vegetation would readily be confounded with the season in which it manifests itself; hence the substitution of Spring, Summer, or May for the tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation would be easy and natural. Again, the concrete notion of the dying tree or dying vegetation would by a similar process of generalisation glide into a notion of death in general; so that the practice of carrying out the dying or dead vegetation in spring, as a preliminary to its revival, would in time widen out into an attempt to banish Death in general from the village or district. The view that in these spring ceremonies Death meant originally the dying or dead vegetation of winter has the high support of W. Mannhardt; and he confirms it by the analogy of the name Death as applied to the spirit of the ripe corn. Commonly the spirit of the ripe corn is conceived, not as dead, but as old, and hence it goes by the name of the Old Man or the Old Woman. But in some places the last sheaf cut at harvest, which is generally believed to be the seat of the corn spirit, is called “the Dead One”: children are warned against entering the corn-fields because Death sits in the corn; and, in a game played by Saxon children in Transylvania at the maize harvest, Death is represented by a child completely covered with maize leaves.

I can already tell that I will have trouble quoting the Golden Bough simply because all of the text ties into one another and each sentence is just as important as the next. It's a text that has stories within stories, just like the movie, Inception. And just like Inception, the explanation to what is real and what is important may be long and confusing. I'll save my Inception rants for another post though. Back to the top quote.....

If you read the whole quote you may reach the conclusion that much of our language is inadequate. Or, more specifically, the fewer the words we try to use, the more nebulous our meaning comes across to the reader. Does corn signify birth, rebirth, death, or all three? It depends on who you ask. I'm not writing this post to deconstruct this passage, however. I believe Professor Sexson has taught too many decades of English classes for him to care THAT much about an undergraduate Literature Major perform close readings of The Golden Bough. I think instead he wants us to inject our personal lives into the readings and class. Our professor is serious when he wants us to eavesdrop on the conversations scattered throughout campus and report back to him. It's how he stays young. He gets a kick out of one of his mythology students producing a phobia with cornfields because of the discussion of Saxon children in Transylvania impersonating dead corn.

Having this knowledge given to us by The Golden Bough is useless if we don't use it. At the very least we should see corn now as "Old Men".

Making Your Writing Stick

In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's essay A Thousand Plateaus, the authors describe a root system that weaves together a seemingly unitary structure that can unfold into multiplicity. The normal thesis is replaced with references and regimes of signs.  The entire framework is compared to a botany framework.  The "root" represents symbols found in various settings that imitate the world. A "radicle" represents the seedling or meaning from a root.  Finally, the radicles and roots conglomerate into a system known as a "rhizome".  An example of hidden multiplicity can be seen in the Harry Potter series. One of the secondary characters is named "Dobbie", an elf that plays the trickster archetype to the main character, Harry Potter.  What many American readers fail to notice is that "dobbie" is a British term for an imbecile. Suddenly a character is interpreted differently based on the audience's knowledge of British slang. The most straight-forward children's fantasy becomes a complex web of inside jokes, cryptic symbols, and befuddling conclusions. Rhizomes act as both barriers and rewards for the reader to extract from the text. This cat and mouse game between the reader and the author
serves as a larger analogy to real life settings.  True rhizomes exist without footnotes because in real life symbols that are not yet defined to people remain meaningless until that person researches that symbol more. In the case of the "dobbie" interpretations, the reader isn't given a footnote to its double- meaning. Instead the reader might not discover the meaning until a
few years later while reading a British anthology text. Each time a new discovery of a text meaning takes place, connections within the rhizome are unearthed, but new radicles can form to expand the rhizome. Hence, a well-designed rhizome should have roots that can form more than one radicle and radicles that make the rhizome bigger.  
  
               In terms of timeless literature, the author must essentially make up as much words and concepts possible in order to have a timeless rhizome. Samuel Colridge made his works stand out because he used words and phrases such as "desynonymize", "esemplastic", and "willful suspension of disbelief". Some of his terms have been understood and used in the 21st century while others are so obscure they remain out of the mainstream lexicon yet still studied with each new generation of English Majors. If an author like Coleridge can add new words to the reader's lexicon over multiple generations, than the rhizome that he created was a success. The root becomes the term "esemplastic", the radicle becomes the meaning that is given to a generation of students, and the rhizome becomes their interpretations and roots that they impose within their own rhizome. In that sense, an author's final contribution from their rhizome is that it becomes the root of a new rhizome to continue the cycle.

Telling Stories

I listened to a podcast last night that talked about a pair of teenage siblings who invented a family to get out of their strict curfew. They would be constantly babysitting for this fictional family. In order to avoid suspicion, the kids crafted the dad as an F.B.I. Agent who could not reveal the details of the family to the the teenagers family. This provided a perfect cover for the siblings to peruse around town late into the night without having to worry.

I brought this up because it goes back to telling stories and how the imagination can help people in more ways than imagined. It's strikingly similar to the Scheherazade story of how she had to craft stories to stay alive. In the case of the lying baby sitters, they had to continually make up more elaborate tales about this fictional family. This family had a summer house so that they could hang out the lake all summer. The lie went on for so long that the mother gradually came to believe the lie out of comfort. In a sense, the mother wanted the kids to have this freedom and yet not under her direct blessing. It parallels the Scheherazade story where the king knew that he could kill the storyteller at any minute, but because he was so entertained and so interested he overlooked his original convictions.

Ultimately Professor Sexson is entertained by our stories and blogs because they are stories within stories. We are all Scheherazade's making up stories to pass the time and be interesting. Although we won't die if we stop telling stories, we might die a bit inside. Deep down we want to be interesting; we want to have an audience for our stories. If we're not telling our stories, than we might as well be dead. There will certainly be more interesting people that will step in to tell their story. Are we really living if we don't tell our story? There are dead people more interesting than living people because the dead people have enough stories to propel their legacy. If we only tell people our stories, then our legacy only lasts a generation, at best. I know I can be more interesting than a dead person. It won't be easy, but all I have to do is accumulate enough stories in writing to build up an interesting repertoire.

The moral of this story is tell stories or die. I just lived to see another day just by writing this blog.

Not the final post

This isn't my last post because there is a good chance I will want to see what I think in the near future.

One of the biggest principles I've learned from this class is the notion that in order to be a good writer, one must practice. A lot. If you're not writing on a regular basis, you forget how to formulate ideas and become a sub-par writer. I have yet to taken another class that has demanded as much scheduled writing as Professor Sexon's class. I've had classes with copius amounts of writing, but writing on a regular basis is much different than writing in chunks.

So on that note I will be chunking off my final post into segments as the year winds down.
This is part 1 of 5.

Final Paper

Seth Grossman

Professor Sexson

Lit 110 Paper

4/28/10

Taking responsibility implies being able to respond to change. It requires the ability to switch behavior when the opportunity arises. It is an important principle to practice in every-day life, whether it’s about responsibility towards our friends or responsibility towards scholarly pursuits. In stories, characters face the same tasks and those with the most burdens, those who act the most, are the heroes. In the song “Change” by Tracy Chapman, she sings about the hypothetical situations in which someone finally makes that change. In Hamlet's case he makes his change only after a series of very grim sufferings take place. In the Brothers Karamazov, Ivan never makes this change; he simply becomes paralyzed by indecision and goes insane.

In Chapman's song, her central thesis is, "if you knew that you would die today and saw the face of god and love, would you change?" In many ways, she's asking both Hamlet and every other character based off of him (including Ivan) what they would do in the waning moments of their lives. Would they change to the persons they try to portray? Would they finally fall into the archetype of the hero instead of bounce vaguely between several inferior ones? Ultimately that's the goal of both Hamlet and Ivan; they want to be the hero and only one succeeds. Chapman also attempts to uncover the tipping point for someone on the brink of change: “How bad, how good does it need to get? / How many losses? How much regret? / What chain reaction would cause an effect? / Makes you turn around, / Makes you try to explain, / Makes you forgive and forget, / Makes you change?” Hamlet’s tipping point is the death of his mother. For Ivan, Alyosha, and Dmitri, there seems to be no tipping point in which they will change their behavior. After years of hostility towards Fyodor, there resentment builds sharply, but they choose not to resolve the conflict. The role of the hero appears empty, but another brother faintly steps in.

Hamlet actually fulfills the role of the hero because he responds; he changes his behavior in the face of God. Hamlet laments over his problems, but by the end of the play he faces them and takes action. Ivan, however, is essentially only a fourth of Hamlet's entire character. The closest hero in the Brothers Karamazov is Smerdyakov because he's the character that responded the most! It would seem that only three brothers would be modeled after the character of Hamlet, but Smerdyakov is the actual action-based hero component of the character. The other brothers basically tip-toed around the situation and left it up to the "lesser known" Karamazov to act. In order for a character to fit the hero archetype, they must overcome the conflict, not assign it to their younger brother. If Hamlet had assigned the killing of his father to Guildenstern, then

Guildenstern would be the hero. A closer look at the details of Smerdyakov’s life reveals a mirror image of a hero’s story arc.

The first part of a typical hero’s life involves the death of one or more parents followed by departure from the home. Smerdyakov’s mother dies in childbirth and is shortly dispatched to culinary school away from the home. He returns as a servant, but nevertheless, he resolves the one of the major conflicts of the novel. Smerdyakov even commits suicide, a reflection of the demise of Hamlet. None of the other brothers commit suicide because they don’t feel nearly as guilty because they didn’t actually commit the crime. In a tragic sense of life contest, Smerdyakov wins because he is the servant of his despicable father and as a result he is given no distinct identity that each of his brothers seem to radiate. He is the “illegitimate brother” who hung cats as a child. He is the Cinderella of the family, but instead of marrying a prince, he kills his father. His brother’s lives don’t seem tragic at all in comparison. They each have mentors or people they share affection with. Smerdyakov is the true tragic hero because his life is brutally tragic and responds like a hero should.

The central plot of the Brothers Karamazov is the killing of Fyodor Karamazov. Several characters had an indirect role in the murder, but Smerdyakov had the most direct role, so technically he can only claim the title. Without his contribution, Fyodor would have lived and the central plot would have been far more disjointed. The three brothers would have been seen as more boring people because it would seem that they had done less. The same can be said if Hamlet never killed his father and the play simply stopped at Act V, scene i. Hamlet would be responsible for the deaths of a lot of other people, but not the one in which the reader truly wants dead. The plot of the play is centered on the atrocity that has taken place at the throne and Hamlet must respond and rectify the conflict to be seen as a true hero. Would he still be a hero if the play ended where he didn't kill King Claudius? I'm not convinced he would be and that is essentially Ivan's role in the Brothers Karamazov. He talks about how his father's death would make the world a better place and yet he doesn't actually murder him. Actions speak louder than words especially in the case of the hero archetype; one must act and not plan on becoming the tragic hero.

In both Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov the pressure on the hero increases as more responsibility is shifted on his shoulders. Hamlet eventually takes this responsibility and turns it in to action, while Ivan, Alyosha, and Dmitri end up deflecting it on each other. The brothers grow and learn about responsibility throughout the story, but the looming responsibility of their father’s death does not transfer over as much as it does to Smerdyakov Karamazov. Only Smerdyakov is able to kill Fyodor Karamozov because he has the most resentment built up towards his father. Only he was able to turn off his brain and respond in a way his brothers could not. He followed Hamlet’s example of finally not thinking so much about a certain problem and instead acted upon his emotions to formulate an action.

Works Cited

Chapman, Tracy. "Tracy Chapman: Change Lyrics."MetroLyrics. MetroLyrics, 20 Feb 2004. Web. 28 Apr 2010.

tracy-chapman.html>.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004.

Shakespeare, William. “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” Retellings: A Thematic Literature Analogy. Ed. M. B. Clarke and A. G. Clarke. New York, McGraw-Hill, 2004. 1215-1317.